I see I didn't make myself absolutely clear. I am running as VNC server on my machine at work. When I try to connect to it through an SSH tunnel via my laptop I get the cascading windows.
It would be infinitely more useful if I could actually control my machine at work instead of kicking back with a beer to watch my new cascading screensaver.
In other words, any ideas what I must be doing wrong to get the cascading desktop from a remote machine?